1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to a method of retrieving storage capacity of damaged or defect sectors by utilizing reserved capacity. More particularly, the invention relates to a special formatting program, which reformats the storage medium and employs the reserved capacity of the storage medium to replace the capacity occupied by the damaged sectors, so as to retrieve the capacity of the storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
As the information technology has been very well developed in the modern society, the application of computers involves versatile fields such as multi-medium, network, data storage, and information transmission. Computers are now basic equipment that almost all kinds of business or professions obligate. Moreover, it is now so common that almost every family owns a computer.
The storage medium used to store information data in a computer comprises a conventional disk, a compact disk (CD), or other media. A conventional floppy disk is to be described as follows.
In a conventional storage medium, a portion of sectors is not to be access under a normal operation. The storage capacity occupied by the portion of sectors is called a reserved capacity of the storage medium. Taking a high density floppy disk as an example, the usable storage capacity is supposed to be 1.44 Mbytes/disk. However, according to a test result under the DOS/Windows environment, at least a usable capacity of about 320 Kbyte is reserved from being used.
In addition, while performing a normal formatting operation, a damaged sector in the disk is marked with a flag to avoid the disk format data in this damaged sector to be accessed any more. As a consequence, the available storage capacity is reduced according to the marked disk format data of the damaged sectors.